The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c8.5

c8.5

At a very early stage in its history the Buddhist Church appropriated to itself many popular cults, folk stories and superstitions, as well as a variety of symbols of a quasi-religious order. Nor did it shrink from taking into its service and making free use of the popular, mundane, and often sensuous, art of the day. All this is clearly reflected in the sculptures of the Early School. Thus, the Jātaka stories, which play such an important role in the decorative scheme of the Bhārhut balustrade, were for the most part, as has long been recognized, nothing but old-time fables to which a new meaning had been given by the Buddhists. The large number of these stories at Bhārhut and the stereotype brevity with which they are recounted leave little room for doubt that they had long been a favourite theme among Buddhist sculptors before wood had been replaced by stone. Indeed, it is more than likely that they had been the common stock-in-trade of Indian sculptors before the days of the Buddha himself, which would account for the strangely anomalous rule of the Church which permitted the person of the Bodhisattva to be portrayed in the scenes of his former lives but not in those of his last one. We need not, however, delay longer over these or other early efforts of the Indian School, since for our present purpose they are less instructive than the later work of that School. Indeed, the only sculptures in this group which require our close attention here are those which were produced in the century between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50, and which were thus immediately antecedent to, or actually contemporary with, the beginnings of Buddhist art in Gandhāra. The finest of these sculptures are to be found on the four gateways of the Great Stūpa at Sāñchī and on the single gateway of the Third Stūpa (that of the Buddha's two chief disciples) at the same site. From them I have selected for illustration a dozen representative examples, which should suffice to give a fair idea of their style and workmanship and of the resemblances or contrasts which they offer with the sculptures of Gandhāra. And, first, let us look at a few examples of the symbolism which played such an important part in Buddhist iconography, and particularly so at this early period, when it was not yet permissible to depict the person of the Buddha.